It’s a cold January day in Massachusetts.
The ocean here around Cape Cod is in the low 40’s and a strong wind is howling off the
water.
But the wind is a blessing.
Stranded on the sand is a juvenile Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle.
This little guy is barely clinging to life.
He would have drowned in the cold water, except that the strong wind blew him ashore.
Sea turtles are marine reptiles that live almost all of their lives in the sea.
They must surface to breathe, but they spend most of their time underwater foraging for
food.
In some places, when the water is cooler like the Galapagos and Hawaii, sea turtles do occasionally
crawl up on the beach to warm up in the sun.
But most sea turtles only come ashore to lay their eggs in a nest at night.
The eggs hatch a few months later and the baby sea turtles race to the sea.
Most won’t come ashore again for many years, as adults, when they are ready to lay eggs
of their own.
There are seven species of sea turtles in the world, like the green sea turtle, the
loggerhead, and the Hawksbill.
All are considered endangered or vulnerable.
But none are rarer than the critically endangered Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle, which lives primarily
in the Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean and Florida.
In the summer, Kemp’s Ridley turtles follow the warm water of the gulf stream northward
into the prime feeding grounds as far away as New England, and even Newfoundland.
As the water cools in the fall, most of them turn and swim south again, hugging the coast,
munching on algae, and making their way back to warm water before winter.
But some of the turtles enter Massachusetts Bay, trapped by Cape Cod, and can’t figure
out how to get home.
As the water gets cooler, the turtles start to freeze.
As reptiles, they cannot keep their bodies warm when the water cools.
They get lethargic and start to have trouble swimming.
Many drown.
But when the wind starts to blow, as it often does, it blows the exhausted animals ashore,
where volunteers from the Massachusetts Audubon Society Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary are
patrolling the beach.
Every year in the fall and early winter, hundreds of sea turtles wash up along the beaches of
Cape Cod.
Most of them are the critically endangered Kemp’s Ridley.
So every year, there is a massive effort to rescue and save as many as possible.
Volunteers look for stranded turtles.
When they find one, they place it gently in a banana box for transport.
Why a banana box?
They are free, strong, and already have ventilation holes.
First the sea turtles are transported back to the Mass Audubon Society Wellfleet office.
Biologist Rebecca Shoer and some volunteers are doing triage.
So the different types of measurements that Colin is doing, the first one is a straight
measurement with a caliper—that gives you an idea of the straight length of a turtle’s
shell, its width, things like that.
Then we do a curved measurement with that soft tape and that gives us an idea of the
shape of the turtle’s shell.
And then we’re doing the weight, which is 2.4—and that’s in kilograms.
The last thing we do before we take photos is that we make any notes of any medical issues
with this turtle.
And you can see on this one, it’s got—it’s bleeding from this eye here.
Don’t know if that was a bird that pecked it or something like that.
So we’ll make a note of that for the aquarium, but this guy’s alive and not looking great,
but this is actually not a turtle in terrible shape.
Soon the turtles are packed up for a 90 minute ride in their banana boxes up to the New England
Aquarium’s Animal Care Center in Quincy, just south of Boston.
In this nondescript warehouse, with a staff of five and a dozen volunteers, hundreds of
sea turtles are being rehabilitated.
Hey!
Hi Katie!
How are you?
I’m doing well, how are you?
Great!
Thanks for having me down!
Thanks for coming over!
I arrive and meet Katie Pugliares, a senior biologist at the New England Aquarium.
She takes me on a tour of the facility and I get to meet a bunch of sea turtles.
The rescued turtles are divided into different tanks based on size, species and even temperature.
The turtles can’t be warmed right up from being hypothermic.
That could actually make them even more sick.
They have to be warmed up very slowly.
As they warm up, they get more active and lively.
I wonder if they know how lucky they are to be alive?
Once they are back up to temperature, they’re hungry.
And sometimes feisty!
We systematically go through, we monitor their weight, make sure they have healthy weight
gain.
If any turtles start losing weight, it’s a sign that we need to look a little more
closely.
We look for any ulcerations in their eyes, obstructions in their nose, we look in their
mouths as well.
And then we check their flippers.
Sometimes infections will progress into their joints and that’s not really a good thing.
For turtles that have prolonged swelling of their joints and even after antibiotic treatment,
they are not going away, we do laser therapy.
And it takes care of those unsightly wrinkles too!
Katie takes me into one of the clinics where a new patient is being checked out—a small
Kemp’s Ridley.
We’re doing a tracheal wash so we can get some of the debris from the upper respiratory,
and we’ll send it out for culture and identify the bacteria.
And then because he does have different sedation drugs, we’ll monitor him for a little while
and make sure his heart rate gets back up to where it should be before we introduce
him back into the pool.
And then we’ll watch him when he gets back into the pool and make sure he responds really
well.
As the stranding season goes on, the rehab pools get full.
The sea turtles have to be numbered to keep track of them all.
There are hundreds of them!
Soon, there are so many that crowding can be a problem.
So the healthiest ones are ready to go back to the wild.
Unfortunately, it’s still winter in Boston, so a small group of lucky turtles get their
own private flight (with a volunteer pilot) down to Orlando, Florida.
Here, Sea World will take over.
The turtles get a check up, then a few days to rest and recover from their flight.
Finally, it’s off to a beautiful Florida beach.
The turtles are released into nice warm water, and given a second chance at life.
Saving cold-stunned sea turtles takes incredible time, money and effort.
It would be staggering to add up the cost involved to save each one of these marine
reptiles.
But when I see this effort, I have renewed faith in humanity.
People do care about wildlife, and in the case of highly endangered animals like the
Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle, every rescue counts.